


sharp as knives

by rainingover



Category: NCT (Band), WAYV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Thieves, Angst, Bank Robbery, Boys In Love, Families of Choice, M/M, On the Run
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-13 17:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21001733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/pseuds/rainingover
Summary: Sicheng knows that having a pretty face can get people places. Luckily, he has one and so does Lucas, and so they get away with a lot of things they really shouldn’t be able to.(Sicheng leads a gang of thieves & falls in love along the way.)





	sharp as knives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for W123. Thank you to my prompter! I really hope you like this.

Sicheng knows that having a pretty face can get people places. Luckily, he has one and so does Lucas, and so they get away with a lot of things they really shouldn’t be able to. 

They could get away with murder, if they tried, which they wouldn’t.

(But they could, and that excites him and scares him in equal measure.)

As well as a pretty face, Sicheng also finds himself in the enviable position of being the leader of a gang of gunslingers who are loyal down to the bone, and this definitely helps to get the job done when merely distracting the bank-teller with wit and charm, and one firearm, just won’t cut it. 

They hit three local banks, hopping town to town in the space of five days. The tellers are all obedient and cooperative, and it’s easy, really. It’s frighteningly, maddeningly easy, and they’re rolling in bank-notes, literally, on day six, laughing until it hurts and then kissing until they can feel nothing but each other’s heartbeats. 

Lucas says, “We just need to hit a few more and then, when we can stop, we’ll never have to worry about money ever again.”

“Who says we’ll stop?” Sicheng watches him through narrowed eyes. They aren’t going to stop. This is their lives now. This is who they are, at their core: thieves, vagabonds, risk-takers.

Lucas just smiles. “I’m just saying.” He places his hands at Sicheng’s waist and turns them until he has Sicheng pushed up against the wardrobe. “I’m not saying we should, just that we could. We wouldn’t need to do this anymore.”

“We’re not stopping,” Sicheng tells him. He keeps his eyes open when they fuck. Sicheng trusts no one, not even the man he loves.

That’s just the way it goes out on the road, it’s how it’s always been, and Sicheng intends to keep it that way. It’s kept him alive up until now and he doesn’t intend to give up his life any time soon. 

Their gang is a group of five that once was seven. 

Kun and Ten, who once were the core of The group, absconded to escape the police, who knew their faces too well. At least, that was their story.  
  
Sicheng doesn’t hear from them any longer, but that is probably for the best. They’d gone soft, the two of them. They'd gone soft with love, choosing each other over a life of crime, over self-preservation, over the gang. Sicheng had struggled to accept it, at first, but with time he'd realised it had been inevitable; they'd been soft all along.

Sicheng will never go soft, he refuses to. He can't.

The three other remaining members of Sicheng’s gang of wayward young men are called Yangyang, Guanheng and Dejun. They are pitifully devoted to the cause (of robbing, of wounding, of leaving a trail of destruction across town) and their allegiance is proven in the gunshot wound to Guanheng’s shoulder, which Dejun tends to with shaking hands as Sicheng counts their stolen money. It’s shown, too, in the resolute way in which Yangyang refuses to give up his friends during his stint behind bars. When he is released, he joins them again with a grinning face and a scar under his lip, and it’s like no time has gone by at all.

Still, as loyal as they are now, Sicheng knows most people don’t stick around forever. His father didn’t and his sister left home as soon as she turned eighteen. This is his family now, but he’s wary all the same.

Sicheng has seen the inside of a jail cell once or twice himself. It was well before this, back when he was still technically a kid, still being chased through rainy alleyways in his home-town, outrunning the cops with ease. Petty crime, they called it, but there was nothing petty about it. It was just a way to get by when there was no one else to help. It was a way to pass the time and to feel something. It was stupid, Sicheng thinks now, but everyone has to start somewhere, even infamous theives who have outran the police for well over a year now.

Sicheng still likes the thrill of it all: the chase, the danger, the exhilaration. It runs through him in electric shots, his spine tingling, his heartbeat racing. It feels good to be breaching when he’s outsmarting the law. 

“You don’t look the type to be doing this,” a woman tells him at their next job, hands where he can see them, the keys to the safe already in Yangyang’s pocket since she handed them over five minutes ago. “You look too sweet for this life.” 

Sicheng laughs, and he points his gun at her and watches her movements carefully, calculating their getaway, until the safe door is open. They take the money and they drive far, far away, but before he leaves the bank behind, Sicheng tells their hostage, “Sweet doesn’t get you much in this world, miss. Now, don’t press any alarms until you’ve counted to at least one hundred, okay?”

The alarm is blaring before they’re barely in the car, but they get away regardless. They always do.

He meets Lucas in their hometown; he’s a regular guy with a regular life and wide eyes that stare at Sicheng too often for too long. 

Sicheng looks like a regular guy from a small town too, he guesses, at least on the surface, but he knows that he isn’t so regular inside. He already has a hunger, is already in trouble with the law, is already ready to run for his life. They’re introduced in Ten’s kitchen when he is twenty one and Lucas is nineteen, and he knows that Lucas is in love with him instantly. It’s written on his face (the pretty face, the one that gets him places) and it’s in the way he says hello shyly, the lightest dash of pink over his cheeks as well. 

Kun pulls him aside and says, "Don't get him involved in the wrong side of things, he’s a good kid," but Sicheng doesn't listen, he never has done.

So Lucas holds up a gas-station in a rural town for the first time less than four months after they meet, and he's _good_ at it. He grins for days, can't keep his hands off Sicheng, kisses him with a ferocity that only comes with the adrenaline rush of doing something bad. 

He keeps saying, "That was crazy, you're crazy.” Then he takes fistfuls of the cash they’ve taken and stares at it in amazement, and then he talks and talks incessantly until Sicheng shuts him up with a well-practised mouth in the back of a wagon parked on a dust-road out of sight. 

"Why don't you like them?" Lucas asks him one night, near the beginning. His jacket smells of whisky and Sicheng's cologne. "The police, what is it about them you hate so much?"

"They’ve put people away, people who have my back." Sicheng watches Lucas carefully. Waits for judgement that doesn't come. "People who didn't deserve it."

He's thinking about Kun's first time behind bars when he says this. Kun hadn't been at fault, that time, or any. Kun isn’t that way inclined. He’d only been protecting Sicheng and Ten. 

Sicheng sighs and looks away. He’s thinking about the unfairness of it all— of the poverty and injustice and about the struggles in his neighbourhood. About the rough handed way in which he'd watched his own fafter be taken away all those years ago.

Lucas asks, "But had they not done something to warrant it? Were they criminals?" He is slow with his words, careful not to offend. Sicheng is starting to like this about him—he’s thoughtful, mindful in the way he talks when he wants to be, though he hides it well behind well placed arrogance and the hint of a smirk.

(This will be useful later: a distraction technique like no other.)

Sicheng turns to him. His face is in shadow here where they sit together on the steps of Ten's front porch. "Define a criminal," he challenges. Part of him wants Lucas to trip up, to say something stupid, to disappoint him with his attitude. That way it'll be easier not to fall in love with him.

Lucas pauses, then. “I suppose... Someone one doesn't live according to the laws of the land?"

“Didn't you drive a motorcar without a license recently?" Sicheng points out.

"What? I'd have lost my job at the factory if I didn't take that delivery, you know that."

Sicheng smiles. Lucas is indignant, righteous, naive with it. It makes Sicheng want to kiss sense into him, but then maybe that would make him as jaded as Sicheng and no one deserves that. "And you buy smuggled cigars, untaxed, illegal,” he says. “You’ve stolen clothes from the laundry at the hotel. I’ve seen you.”

"I guess.” Lucas’ brow furrows. He seems offended by the insinuation that he is, by definition, a criminal too. “But no one round here can afford not to do those things and–"

"So by that definition," Sicheng interrupts him. "Aren't all of us here criminals?"

Lucas is thinking it through, Sicheng can see it on his face. He opens his mouth to argue, and then closes it again, and shrugs. “I suppose you’re right. I just—I’d never do anything bad, you know? I’m an opportunist. I’m surviving, that’s all. I’m just trying to survive.”

“That’s all we can do,” Sicheng says to him. “That’s all any of us can do. It’s all we’ve got ahead of us.”

Lucas’ hand finds his in the darkness and Sicheng forgets, for just a second, that he doesn’t believe in love. “Not everything. You’ve got me now, in this together until the end.”

A pretty face gets you places. It gets you into the best seats at the theatre, should you wish to visit it, and Sicheng does, just once or twice, to pick-pocket from the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who flirt with him obnoxiously while he eyes up their jewellery and watches. A pretty face gets you the attention of other pretty faces, which can be pleasant for an evening or two. And it can get you favours— favours like the use of a key to the truck that delivers fresh bank-notes into town, left unguarded for just a few moments as the security guard takes a leak, which is how their reign of succession began. 

Unfortunately, having a pretty face also gains the attention of the press, and the public who eat up what the press feeds to them like famished, starving gossip-mongers. 

It only takes a matter of months before there are wanted posters of them printed in the nationals, and people talk in scandalised whispers about the pair of robbers with the bedroom eyes and their gang of handsome runaways. Those sorts of faces, they say, are usually only seen on the screen actors that play highwaymen and cowboys and Roman soldiers in the new talking movies. The press says women, especially, should be careful and describe Lucas and Sicheng as owning the sort of smouldering gazes that would surely make any hot-blooded woman weak at the knees if viewed in person. 

Sicheng finds this amusing, for the press forget to warn the men too, and the men drop to their knees just as quickly. 

After six months of running together, Sicheng still isn’t sure if Lucas is addicted to the thrill of the chase or just the thrill of falling in love, but it’s probably a mixture of the two. They’re both a certain kind of madness, and Sicheng feels it too. He never imagined becoming this entangled in romance, or sex, or whatever this is, not when his mind should be on evading the police and making as much money as he can doing it, but now he’s here it’s too late.

He’ll put an end to it, one day, he thinks as Lucas sleeps next to him in a guest-house on a dust-road outside of town. But then Lucas joins him on his next job, and then the next, and then Kun and Ten disappear like dissipating smoke, as if they were never there at all. Lucas holds his hand tighter after the next job and Sicheng appreciates it more than he ever has. 

Yangyang, young and beautiful and probably a little bit unhinged rips down the wanted poster that’s stuck to the telegraph pole in another sleeping town. He sets it on fire with one easy strike of a match, and then he does it again and again whenever he sees one of their faces staring out at him from faded paper. He burns down a whole sheriff's station one night. No one is inside, but Sicheng isn't sure Yangyang would care either way. He gets this look in his eyes, sometimes, that is too far away for Sicheng to place. Sicheng wonders if one day he'll betray them all. Everyone has a downfall and maybe he is theirs, Sicheng thinks. Maybe they’ll lose it all to the baby-faced schemer one day, but for now he’s loyal and he’s good to have around. 

Dejun and Guanheng, who come way of Kun and Ten respectively and then stay longer than the older couple do, aren’t sleeping together until they are, and then Sicheng watches them more carefully than he had ever done before. Sex turns to love, he knows that all too well, and sex and love and loyalty intertwine in a way that mean Sicheng knows that really, at the end of the day, the only person they travel with who is truly, completely and irrevocably loyal to him is Lucas.

Nothing comes close to sex and love for the way that they cloud the vision, and sometimes Lucas looks truly lost in it all, so much so that it makes Sicheng’s chest constrict with pain. 

Sicheng feels it too—that inkling of love taking hold over his senses— but he'd never admit it, he is too cautious, too wary. Still, he knows Lucas won't leave him, if only because Sicheng has always planned to leave first and he doesn't intend to act any differently now, even when it starts to get harder and harder to envision a life without Lucas by his side.

Love might feel impenetrable, but everything has an expiry date, and he intends to be the one that decides when that might be. He can’t imagine it any other way.

There's a light on in their room at the inn when Sicheng gets back from the tense meeting with an ammunitions dealer with Guanheng and Yangyang. 

Sicheng likes this part of the job: meeting strangers with suspect motives and getting out of something tricky alive. They’d paid good money for the bullets hidden in his jacket, but not more than they’ll make on the job they intend to complete in two days time.

"Lights on. It seems he waited up for you." Yangyang looks at him out of the corner of his eye. "How sweet." 

Sicheng pulls up the collar on his coat. "I didn't ask him to stay up," he points out, annoyed at the suggestion that he and Lucas are soft for each other, regardless of the truth in it. "He should be resting. Maybe he’s just fallen asleep with the lamp on."

Guanheng says, "Don't be mad at him for staying up. It's just because he, you know, cares about you. About all of us.”

Sicheng wonders how much Lucas has told their gang about their relationship. He wonders what he says about the things they do alone, about the words they whisper under bed-sheets in the dark. He isn't ashamed of it, fuck he doesn't care one bit about what people think of him, but it makes him feel restless, like he wants to flee. He'll have to flee one day; this lifestyle must come with an ending, it has to, and Sicheng has always envisioned being alone at the climax of it all. 

The ties of love don't fit into the end of his story, and though sometimes he wonders about a future with Lucas, he knows that love is just another way to pass the time.

'I'm not mad." he says. "I'm just... It's just that we have a lot to do tomorrow. I need one of you to scope out the locking up procedure at the bank. How many bank workers are present at closing, who they are, do they look distractible? The usual things we need to know."

They stand in the doorway to the inn. The music inside is loud, and there's no one around out here. It's too cold for that. It's surprisingly easy to plan bank robberies in winter. 

"Can't Dejun do that?" Yangyang frowns. He's been doing this lately— turning his nose up at certain jobs, testing the waters. He used to be such a good kid, Sicheng remembers him back in town, helping his uncle sell cigars and newspapers. But he's not ten now, he's a man of eighteen and he's fuelled by rage and pride, and a thirst for danger. Sicheng hasn't got time for his arrogance.

"Why, you think it's not a good enough job for you? Do you think it isn't an important part of a job?" Sicheng asks him. 

Yangyang huffs out a breath. "That's not what I said." The scar under his lip is more obvious tonight. 

"You didn't need to say the words, Yangyang. I’m a sharp character." Sicheng stares him down. “I can tell what you’re saying.”

"Just because I'm the youngest of us, I'm not green you know." Yangyang crosses his arms over his chest, defiant. He looks like he did two years ago before he went inside for a while. “And I just think I deserve more than being the damn look-out boy."

Guanheng goes very still beside them, he doesn't want drama, Sicheng can sense it. He just wants to get into the warmth, fuck around with Dejun and pretend there isn't any tension growing between the gang. But there is tension, and there'll always be tension, because they're criminals and criminals can't be trusted, not one of them. Sicheng trusts himself and his grandmother, and that's about it. He trusts Lucas sometimes, but he knows he shouldn't. 

Lucas certainly shouldn't trust him.

"Fine." Sicheng shrugs. "Don't be the look-out boy. Sit this one out. We can do it with four, we have before and we can again."

"Good." Yangyang still has that defiant look in his eye. He won't back down even if he wants to, now. Sicheng knows his gang well, that's why he keeps them around even when they're acting like petulant teenagers.

"I could get used to dividing our earnings between four. Couldn't you?" Sicheng looks at Guanheng. Guanheng looks pointedly at the space between them both and says nothing. Sicheng admires his resilience in the face of confrontation. 

"I doubt we even get equal shares anyway." Yangyang scowls, he's relentless now. No wonder he got himself arrested, Sicheng thinks. He doesn't know when to stop talking, or he knows but he continues to do it anyway, regardless of possible outcomes. "You and Lucas are probably putting some away for your honeymoon fund."

Guanheng's eyes widen at his friend’s bravery.

The silence is loud as Sicheng raises his eyebrows. "I've always shared what we make equally. But you're right, maybe it's time to put myself at the top. I lead this entire operation, do I not?"

Yangyang looks like he's going to refuse to answer the question.

"Do I not?" Sicheng asks again. He has a headache and his hands are cold. He just wants to be inside now, in bed with Lucas. But the others can't know that, the others look up to him, they rely on him. He isn't weak and he won't be disrespected.

Finally Yangyang sighs. "Yes."

Guanheng clears his throat. "Me and Yangyang will go check out the closing-time situation at the bank tomorrow," he says. "I think Dejun needs to check the brakes on the car so he'll be busy with that. But we'll survey the perimeter and get a feel of the tellers who will be there when we take the place."

"Good." Sicheng turns to go inside. Part of him wishes he had ignored Yangyang's bad mood, but they're a family. Families argue and, if Sicheng is honest with himself, this one has been a long time coming. "I'll see you both in the morning."

Lucas is waiting for him when Sicheng slips into the room they’re renting from the landlady downstairs. "What's wrong?" He's playing cards by himself at the table by the window. He's been bored, Sicheng can tell, but still he's stayed awake all night to wait for him. Sicheng's chest feels tight.

"Nothing." He shrugs off his jacket and unbuttons his shirt. Lucas gets up from the table and stands behind him, wrapping him in his arms.

"Baby." Lucas rests his chin on Sicheng's shoulder. "It's just me and you now. I've been waiting for _hours_." 

"You didn't have to wait up for me." Sicheng pretends not to be affected by the warms of Lucas' body and the way his hands wander over his stomach. "I've never asked that of you. I wouldn't do it for you." 

Lucas laughs, a hollow sound at Sicheng's throat. "You don't have to keep reminding me that I love you more."

"That's not fair." Sicheng sighs, because he does, despite it all, despite himself, he loves Lucas. And maybe in another world they could be Kun and Ten, slipping away together in the night to live a quiet life of solitude at a vineyard out east. Just not here, not now. "I love you as much as I can."

Lucas lets him go and walks to the bed where he sits in his undershirt, his tanned arms a stark contrast to the white fabric. "You mean as much as you'll allow yourself to," he says and looks up at Sicheng. "You know, every night when we go to sleep part of me expects to wake up to you gone."

"Stop it." Sicheng leans down, hands either side of Lucas. "That isn't going to happen." Not yet, he thinks.

(One day, though.) 

Lucas smiles. He looks like a little part of heaven, and Sicheng remembers the time following the night on the steps of Ten's front porch, when they were so wrapped up in each other that Sicheng thought that maybe they were invincible. At times like this, sometimes it feels like they still are.

"Yeah?" Lucas tilts his head back, looks up from under dark eyelashes. "Kiss me, then.”

There aren't a lot of situations where Sicheng will accept orders, but this one he is happy to comply with.

That night, after Lucas is asleep, Sicheng swallows nerves at the thought of Yangyang actually going his own way like their friends have before them. Sicheng has never liked losing people or having people leave, which is ironic, and he knows it, because it’s exactly what he intends to do to everyone he loves. 

Dejun works on the car as Sicheng sits behind the wheel and watches the comings and goings of the town. He is particularly interested in the Sheriff’s deputy, who has been eyeing their vehicle for the last two days. He’d approached Dejun about it, actually, the day before. Asked their intentions, where they were headed, simple questions with complicated answers.

“I told him we were passing through. Fixing up the car in town and then heading South.” Dejun pauses and smiles. “It’s not even a lie, not really. We’ll be out of here by tomorrow night.”

Dejun cannot lie. Sicheng has known this all along, since the day he joined them. By all accounts, he should have been disregarded a long time ago; he’s a liability, a ticking time-bomb in motion. Maybe _he’ll_ be their downfall, Sicheng thinks. Maybe he’ll slip up one day and lead the law right to their door.

The thing is, since Kun and Ten upped and left them behind, retired from the danger to be together in relative harmony, Sicheng can’t bear to think about more of their little family deserting them. Not even Dejun, who they should have left behind in ‘thirty two. It’s not that he’s bad at what they do—he wouldn’t have evaded the police for this long if he was, none of them would—it’s just that he’s too sweet. And he can’t lie.

Sicheng aks him, “How many times have you considered leaving us?”

“None.” Dejun looks up, confused. ‘Why?” 

“I just wondered.” Sicheng shrugs, tries to pass it off as idle chatter and nothing more. “What if Guanheng asked you to leave?” 

Dejun is a deer caught in the headlights of Sicheng’s questioning and for a second Sicheng feels bad about it, feels an urge to hug him instead of quiz him. But he’s the leader of the gang and he can’t trust anyone and he wants to know the truth. So Sicheng just considers Dejun, bent down beside the front wheel of the truck while Sicheng half-hangs out of the driver seat and looks at him.

“Answer me,” he says.

"He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t ask that of me.” Dejun stands up. There’s grease on his fingers that stains his neck as he rubs at it nervously. “We want to be here, we want to stay. Why? Has someone said something?” 

Sicheng considers lying, but what would it achieve? The group is as fragmented as ever, he knows it too well, and hearing it from the mouths of their most delicate isn’t going to change anything. He shakes his head. “I’m just making small-talk, Dejun, that’s all. I won’t do it again since I’m so bad at it.” He smiles and Dejun laughs with him, and the dread inside Sicheng’s heart remains.

Lucas arrives soon after with news of a police raid the town over. “They’re on our tail again,” he says, voice low, hat pulled down over his eyes. “We need to get out of here.”

Sicheng nods. “After the job.”

“No, now,” Lucas presses. He takes Sicheng's arm. "They're looking for us."

Sicheng shrugs him off. “We’ll do the job tonight. We’ll bring it forward. We’re ready, aren’t we? Why put it off?”

“You don’t need to complete every job, Sicheng.” There's something in Lucas' eyes that makes Sicheng wish that he could turn back time, way back to Ten's kitchen, before he got him involved in this life. They're too far gone, though, and he can't change anything. All he can do is keep going until he can't go any further. 

“Don’t tell me what I do or don’t need." Sicheng's words are cold. "We’ll hit the bank tonight. Be ready and tell the others." 

Lucas has hold of his arm again before he's even taken five steps. "Why are you doing this?" He whispers once they're out of Dejun's earshot. "Is this a game to you?"

"Yes," Sicheng replies. "And I won't accept anything less than a win. So you're in or you're out. Which one is it?"

"I'm in.” Lucas looks defeated. “You know I'm in."

Sicheng lets Lucas kiss him before they pack up the truck and leave the inn, and he kisses back with more urgency than he wishes he would allow. He's meant to be the measured one, he's the eldest now, he's leading them. He can't allow himself these indulgences, these momentary lapses, he shouldn't.

He needs to start making plans to let them all go. But first, they have money to steal, together as a team.

The job goes wrong. 

It goes wrong and it's his fault, and Dejun is missing when they pile into the car, the money gone, alarms blaring behind them as the rain lashes down and soaks their clothes. 

"If he's hurt," Guanheng says, voice clear above the noise. "If he's hurt, I'll..." 

"He'll be okay." Lucas puts a hand on Guanheng's shoulder. "He was just behind us. He's coming."

But the sirens arrive before he does, and Sicheng has no choice but to accelerate away down dust tracks out of the town, away from them all: the police, the money, Dejun.

"What are you doing?" Guanheng shouts above the noise, voice thick with emotion, from the back of the truck. "Go back! Go back!"

Sicheng doesn’t speak, he just drives. “You really don’t care, do you?” Guanheng spits at him when they finally pull up at the side of the road an hour later, burst tyre slowing them down. “He’d do anything for us and you’ve left him to the cops.”

“He’ll be okay.” Yangyang ushers Guanheng aside. “He’s good with a gun, and he’s quick and he’s clever.”

Guanheng shakes his head, shaking with rage and worry. “If they get him, if—or worse, if he’s injured… He stayed with me when I was bleeding out that time last year, you know he did. I should have stayed back there with him.”

“Pull yourself together, we need to get this tyre changed.” Sicheng tries to keep his voice steady. His heart is still in his throat and he feels sick to his stomach. How could he have been so careless, how could he have let that guard get to the door before them? “And then we need to drive back to Ten’s old place and decide on our next course of action.” 

They go to Ten’s place because it’s their designated safe-house: the one place they’ve all agreed to head to if they ever get themselves in a sticky situation. Despite the law’s obsession with him, Sicheng knows that the police have never raided it. It’s only Ten that ever managed to stay low enough to be considered a mystery by the press. It helped that he wasn’t from around here, it made him good at slipping just out of their grasp, which is a shame really, because his face would make a stunning Wanted poster too.

Sicheng cries that night for the first time in years, locks himself in the bathroom at Ten’s empty house and sobs angrily into his fist. Then he waits until his eyes are no longer red and slips back into the room quietly so no one needs to know about it.

"I had to drive away," he tells Lucas as he gets into bed. "What choice did I have?"

Lucas doesn't answer him, and Sicheng can't bear the silence.

Dejun is just there, sitting in the kitchen by himself the next morning. He says, “I was right behind you,” and it sounds like an accusation. He looks tired, bloodshot eyes matched with a ripped shirt and wet hair, but aside from that Sicheng is glad to see he’s unhurt. 

“We waited as long as we could,” Lucas tells him, though it’s clear he is lying for Sicheng. “And we knew you’d be fine.”

Dejun nods. He looks tired. 

Sicheng speaks before he’s even thought it through. “I’m sorry,” he says. He hasn’t said those words in a long time, and he hasn’t meant it when he’s said for even longer than that. He means it now, though and it surprises him just how much.

Sicheng feels Lucas’ hand resting at his lower back, just to remind him that Lucas is there for him, supporting him, and it makes him feel even worse.

“It’s fine. We all knew what we were signing up for, including me.” Dejun looks up. “But, you know, I didn’t have to come back. I could have slipped away like Kun and Ten did.”

“Why didn't you?” Sicheng asks him, but Dejun is looking past him and Lucas now, and Sicheng gets his answer in Guanheng standing in the doorway. 

Guanheng smiles at Dejun as if he sees no one else.

“Come on, let's go upstairs.” Guanheng speaks to Dejun in a quiet voice, ignoring Sicheng’s presence in the room. “You need to get some rest.”

“We need to be back on the road in a couple of hours,” Sicheng reminds them; survival always on his mind. “So we can keep evading the law.”

“Which one of us are you planning to drive away without this time?” Guanheng asks him, tartly, but he doesn’t wait around for an answer, just leads Dejun away upstairs and leaves Sicheng and Lucas standing in the kitchen.

Sometimes Sicheng thinks about Kun, and wonders if maybe he’d been right back then, in Ten’s kitchen, when he’d told Sicheng not to get Lucas involved in his schemes. Kun was always a little over-protective of Lucas, Sicheng had thought. Now he recognises it for what it really was: his humanity. 

Kun’s protective nature was both his weakness and his strength, one and the same, and it continued to drive the decisions he made with the gang until he made his most important decision he could: to leave their life of crime behind for good.

But Sicheng is a man obsessed, and he can’t leave it because he _lives_ it. It’s all he knows, all he wants and sees and it’s all he is good at. It’s the thrill and the danger, and it’s the all-consuming hate he has for the law and it’s prejudice against the poor, and it’s the way that the money smells fresh from the safe as they bundle it into their sacks and leave. 

He can never stop being who he is, this is his life until the day he dies, and that’s what Lucas doesn’t understand. Lucas thinks this is a section of their lives that will one day end and be replaced with something more mundane, and that’s why they’ll never last. That’s why Sicheng will have to move on and go this alone, or with a new gang.

He can’t go back to regular life because it’s too far out of reach now, and Sicheng knows he’d only end up a disappointment to Lucas, just like his father was to his mother back home before he was taken to jail. They’d grow old angry and resentful and they’d wish for the excitement of their youth, and Sicheng could never face that.

So he’ll keep running from the law or he’ll die trying to, and Lucas can let him go. That’s the plan.

Lucas loses a tooth in a particularly raucous fist fight in a particularly raucous speakeasy and pays a dentist to fit a solid gold replacement the following night. He shows it off excitedly to the gang, grin wide as he points it out to Yangyang in a room above a tavern, seventeen miles outside of the next town they plan to hit. Yangyang looks impressed, says, “I want one,” and Lucas says, “Your scar is cooler,” and grins at him fondly.

Guanhengand Dejun—more distant than they’ve ever been—make interested noises and then drift away downstairs to the tavern to whisper in quiet corners together like they’ve been doing a lot recently.

Sicheng waits until they’re alone before he lets Lucas know that he's angry. “Your face is already printed all over the country and now you’ve got a distinguishing feature to boot.”

Lucas kisses him and smiles, that one damn tooth glinting in the light of the old fashioned gas lamp in the corner of the room. “Is my handsomeness not distinguishing enough?”

“This is serious.” Sicheng sighs. “You know it is.”

“I know. I know, but… I got carried away.” He looks sheepish. He looks his age. Sometimes Sicheng feels so weighed down by the reality of their lifestyle that he forgets they’re just young men, just bodies, and blood, and too many feelings. 

Sicheng wants to stay angry, but he can’t. He can’t do it, not when Lucas is looking at him with such earnest eyes. “How did I come to this?” he asks, not that he wants an answer. “I didn’t want to fall for you.”

“Why? Because I’m stupid?”

“You’re not stupid. Naive, sometimes. Reckless? Yes. But if you were stupid I’d have never trusted you like I do.” Sicheng starts to take off his clothes, because that’s where this is going, it’s where this will end up. Always does. “I didn’t want to fall for you because it’s takes our eyes off the road and one day… one day it’ll have to end, before it gets one of us killed.”

“Is this about Dejun?” Lucas pulls him closer. “About the failed job last month?”

Sicheng looks away. “It’s about more than that.” It’s about when he has to go, it’s about whether he’ll be able to do it. He's never felt bad about betrayal before, but the more he keeps Lucas around the harder it’s going to be. 

“Let’s take it real slow tonight. I wanna really feel you.” Lucas lowers his voice. “Let’s fuck slower than ever before.”

But they don’t take it slow, they kiss with a hunger that Sicheng only usually feels as he enters a bank, and they push each other to their limits, and they sleep like they’re dead afterwards. 

When he was just a child, Sicheng watched his father being led away from the house by two men in uniform while his mother cried at the door. He was ushered inside the house by one of his aunts but it was too late. By then he’d already seen the look on his father’s face: stony and defeated.

Maybe that’s where his anger comes from, he thinks. And maybe it’s misguided. Maybe the law isn’t to blame, maybe they _are_ all bad— him, his gang, his father. Mainly him. 

He turns over and comes face to face with Lucas, fast asleep next to him, his lips slightly parted and his expression serene. Sicheng tries to picture them like Kun and Ten; away from here, quietly living above the law, but he can’t imagine it, no matter how hard he tries.

  
They hit a pawn shop that specialises in jewellery from the turn of the century and take two sacks of cash, watches, and rings studded with gems. That night they get drunk as a woman sings in the corner of a bar, and Sicheng feels like he did after their first few jobs—filled with excitement, an addictive sort of joy and a world brimming with opportunities. The nerves are there, simmering underneath his skin, but they’re easy to ignore, always have been, and he feels awake to the sharp colours of the world. 

“I like it when you’re this happy,” Lucas tells him as they fall into bed together with loose limbs and wandering hands. Lucas’ kisses like a fever: hot and unbridled, and far reaching. “It makes me happy too.”

“You make me happy,” Sicheng says, in a drunken haze of desire, judgement clouded. As soon as he says it, he knows it’s the fatal blow, because Lucas is looking at him with such a soft expression, so much love written on it like Sicheng has just hung the stars in the sky for him, and he knows he’s looking back at Lucas with much the same feeling.

The windows steam up and the bed creaks something stupid, but he couldn’t care less in the moment. And maybe it’s the alcohol or maybe it’s the way that Lucas presses him into the mattress as he murmurs incoherently in ecstasy, or maybe it’s the stack of fresh banknotes that Sicheng can see out of the corner of his eye, but he’s never felt more at home in his life.  


He catches Lucas wearing one of the rings they should have sold to their contact on the other side of the country weeks ago. “What’s this?” He runs his finger over it. Lucas takes his hand and holds it gently.

“There were two of them. I thought maybe we could both wear them.” He looks down at Sicheng’s hand in his own.

Sicheng knows that this could be something bigger, that they could burn down the world with their love if he’d let them, both sharper than knives and soft for each other with it. 

Right now, they’re on fire. But everyone knows that flames die out and Sicheng has never been a romantic, so the thought of dying together like reckless star-crossed lovers holds no appeal.

He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t be so reckless as to wear stolen goods,” he says and pulls his hand away. “I will not let you get us caught. I will leave you behind before I let that happen.”

“Do it, then. Do it now.” Lucas slides off his ring, thrusts it into Sicheng’s hands. “Goodbye.”

They argue like this more and more, and every time they kiss the words away afterwards, bite at each other’s skin and cry out each other’s names when they come.  
  
Time is an unwelcome guest and with it the police find better leads and mouths that talk, and Ten’s house is no longer safe for them to return to, the police closer behind to them than ever before.

Sicheng dreams of sirens and gunfire and they hit the biggest bank they’ve ever robbed as the sun sets outside the windows like they’re in a scene from a movie. Sicheng loves Lucas, he knows that now, and it scares him more than it ever has before. 

It’s a day on the wrong side of summer the following year—the side of summer that is too hot, too sticky, too _much—_when he does it. Yangyang hasn’t been seen in days and Sicheng can only assume he’s starting fires somewhere. Guanheng and Dejun are playing cards in the back room, except the curtains at the windows are drawn and the door is locked, which suggests they aren’t playing cards at all.

Sicheng is glad that it’s just the two of them. Leaving someone, like loving them, is an intimate event.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he turns the key and locks the handcuff to the cast iron radiator on the wall. “I really am.”

“What… What are you doing?” Lucas just looks at him. He’s bigger than Sicheng but Sicheng has always been a step ahead of him, so it had been easy to distract him and then to slip the cuff over his wrist gently. He already packed up the money and the jewellery last night, and he has the keys to the car already in the ignition; he has checked the tyres twice already so he can be sure of a clean getaway. He’s more nervous now than they ever have been when evading capture by the police, which seems stupid but also makes a lot of sense.

“It has to end here, Lucas. You know it as well as I do.” Sicheng shrugs. “These sort of love stories only end in two ways: with death or with jail, and I don’t fancy the idea of either right now.”

“You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t take everything from us, I know you don’t want to.” Lucas please with eyes that are wide, dark and as desperate as his voice sounds. “I thought we were in this together until the end?”

“We were.” Sicheng tries to keep his voice level. He picks up the duffel bag, it strains under the weight of everything they’ve stolen. “_This_ is the end. It was always going to end like this, we both know it.”

  
  
  


He makes it thirty miles outside of town before he realises that he’s been followed, and who by. Not the police, not this time. 

He has no idea where Lucas has got the car he’s in from or how he’s driving it so smoothly at the speed he’s doing. He can’t tell if any of the others are in the back and he’s intrigued, really, at what Lucas plans to do. He doesn’t usually take the lead, but he’d make a good leader, if he just stopped to think once in a while. Sicheng puts his foot on the gas and speeds up, thinks hard about the route he can take to lose the car on his trail and as it starts to rain, and he checks his mirror for the tenth time that minute, Sicheng starts to wonder if this is really going to end the way he always envisioned after all. 

(Becoming anonymous, needing no one, slipping pocket-watches from the coats of men in bars, holding up tiny stores he can cope with by himself and then disappearing into the maze of a city he’s never visited.)

When Sicheng hit the first pot-hole, he is determined to keep driving, but Dejun isn’t here to fix it up and the gas is running low and Lucas is still on his tail. The rain is heavier than before, and Sicheng is thinking about kissing Lucas in Ten’s kitchen years ago and wishing he’d left it at that: just one kiss.

When the car judders to a stop and Sicheng is forced to get out and check the tyres, Lucas is already out of the car behind him. His shirt is wet and it sticks to his chest in places.

Sicheng turns to run, but then there is a gun to his back and Lucas’ strong hand is on his arm. His voice is low. “Drop the bag,” he orders. 

Sicheng grits his teeth. He does as Lucas asks him to and drops the bag, though. He always said he’d die before he gave himself up, and he will, but Lucas isn’t made for killing. It’ll leave him too scarred and Sicheng doesn’t want to do that to him; that’s going too far even for him, even now. 

“My love,” Sicheng says. “Be reasonable here.”

“Be reasonable? You were going to leave me high and dry.” Lucas’ voice at his ear is filled with grief. 

“But _alive_.”

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Lucas tells him. “You must know that at least. I couldn’t hurt you.”

“It turns out I know nothing at all.” He closes his eyes and the raindrops sliding over his face. He certainly didn’t expect this retaliation. When he turns to face Lucas he asks, “Did you ever love me?”

“More than you know. More than you ever loved me, I’m sure of it.” The smile he gives Sicheng is true and it’s sad, and it makes Sicheng feel foolish because he knows that Lucas loves him. He’s always known— that’s been the problem all along.

“I don’t know. You might be wrong about me,” Sicheng admits. “Because I love you even right now, even with my life in your hands.”

Lucas closes his eyes as if to force himself to continue. “You started this,” he whispers. 

“I thought I was ending it.” Sicheng smiles.

“If you give yourself up, the police won’t shoot you when they arrive. Please give yourself up to them, please Sicheng. They’ll be here any minute.” 

“You tipped them off?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not a talker,” he says, _“_It must have been someone from town. But I won’t be sticking around here either to be caught.”

“I’ll come with you, in your car,” Sicheng tries. He feels lost, like the little boy watching his father be led away outside of his house fifteen years ago. “We can still lose them, they don’t know the car you’re in.” 

He knows it’s pointless—Lucas has made up his mind just like Sicheng made up his mind to be the first to let go at the moment he first met Lucas. 

“You were always going to leave me first, love,” Lucas says and then he’s gone, car backed out of the dirt track road and back into the highway as Sicheng stands in the rain by himself. 

For once Sicheng bites back the urge to ignore someone else’s advice, to go out guns blazing, fighting until the end. Instead, he does what Lucas has asked of him, keeps his head held high, his gun in the car, and accepts his fate as sirens round the corner.

The handcuffs are cold against his skin; the police don’t stop to check if they hurt, not like he did with Lucas. The police are brimming with pride at catching one of the most wanted men in the country and they call him pretty and touch his wet hair, and Sicheng bites one of them on the wrist just because he can. 

The jail cell he is thrown into is just as he remembered from all those years ago, except more desolate, more grey. He closes his eyes, rests his head against the cold wall of his cell, and thinks of hot kisses and steady hands, and wonders if it could have ended differently between them; if maybe it didn’t need to end at all.

He sleeps on a cold bench and listens to the voices of drunken men in the cells next to his, and he wonders what Kun would think of him now.

He dreams about Lucas and the look in his eyes when Sicheng had walked away from him, and it hurts so much more than the beating he takes from a cop the next morning.

It’s Dejun who lies his way into the prison Sicheng resides in eight months later, which Sicheng can hardly believe. If it was anyone else, Sicheng might be worried that they were here to do him harm, but Dejun winks at him with a warm smile in a corridor off the mess hall and Sicheng can tell he can still trust him, as crazy as it sounds.

The riots that begin that night when the doors unlock are wild and his heart beats loudly in his ears. They’re down to Dejun, Sicheng knows and then Dejun has him by the hand and they're out of the prison walls and on the road before Sicheng can barely breathe. 

Sicheng is pulled into the back of a truck, breathless and disoriented. “How did you…”

“You are not the first person I’ve busted out of prison,” Yangyang tells him from the front seat. He looks no older than he did before, in fact he could pass for even younger. “I did it myself a couple of years ago, if you remember that story.”

“You never let us forget,” Guangheng points out. “That’s how you got your scar.”

He's in the back, Dejun already beside him, when Sicheng turns to face him. “You three…”

“How are you, boss?” Guangheng asks him. “Enjoyed your time inside? Made any useful friends?”

Sicheng bites at his lip. Things still won’t add up. “Im… I’m confused. Why would you do this for me?”

“After you took the fall for us? After you gave Lucas the money and let the police take only you?” Dejun looks at him with an admiration that Sicheng doesn’t deserve.

Guanheng leans over and squeezes his shoulder. “How could we not?”

Sicheng takes a breath at the realisation that Lucas never told them the truth about that day of hot storms, handcuffs and dirt roads. The day he left.

Lucas has painted him a hero and not the villain he truly is, and he can’t fathom out why. 

  
  


He finds out that night, holed up in a house belonging to a cousin of Yangyang’s. Lucas waits in the doorway until Sicheng notices he’s there. He looks nervous, like he did when they first started seeing each other. Sicheng feels it too.

“Hello,” he puts down his razor and dries his chin. It feels good to have a proper shave after all this time. “I wasn't expecting to see you here.”

Lucas smiles. “You look good.”

“I’ve been on a retreat,” Sicheng replies dryly. “You'd have been bored there.”

Lucas doesn’t say he’s sorry, and Sicheng is glad for it.

“You didn’t tell them that I left that morning,” Sicheng says. “You didn’t tell them I was taking everything with me.”

Lucas shrugs. “I didn’t know how to say it,” he admits. “So I just never did.” He’s still as handsome as ever, a little bigger maybe, strong armed and strong jawed. 

Sicheng crosses the room to the door and stands in front of him. His eyes are like liquid gold, more expensive than anything they found in a bank vault. “I missed you,” he admits. 

“Did you ever consider choosing me over the money?” Lucas asks him. He cups Sicheng’s chin in his hand—smooth and warm, just like Sicheng remembers. 

“Many times.” Sicheng doesn’t break eye contact. “More than you’d know.”

Lucas furrows his brow, trying to understand. “Then why didn’t you?” 

Sicheng sighs; a slow outtake of breath that feels like a release. He knows they’re going to kiss after this, he knows it. “Because I’m a criminal.” 

Lucas, who he loves, Sicheng can’t deny it now, smiles and his gold tooth can just be seen. “By what definition?”

“All of them,” Sicheng replies honestly. “And I always will be.”

They shut the door behind them and kiss more softly than they ever have done before.

  
  



End file.
